


keep your head up

by ocelot



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 11:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18637540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ocelot/pseuds/ocelot
Summary: the smell of burnt peaches is all i have to remember you by.





	keep your head up

We could have been something beautiful, but you had to die, you motherfucker.

_Not blaming you. I'm. Not. Blaming. You._

He wrings his hands the way  _he_  used to. He cradles his cigarette between his fingers like  _he_ used to. He never noticed how much that motherfucker had gotten into his blood and now it felt like bile gurgling up his throat. Ash runs off the end of his cigarette onto his pant leg, he brushes it off and inhales deep, tasting everything he never got to say to  _him._ He hasn't said his name since the bond fire. The lights dance up into the night sky and look almost beautiful...magical, but all he can think about is the stench of the burning peach and how it's purified the air. It burns his eyes, it burrows itself under his tongue and all he tastes his ash. The bitterness so pungent he almost gags. He breathes out. The Monster got to spend so much more time with Q -- smoking and looking at him like he was some delicate small thing that he could break with a touch of a smile to the corners of his lips. Eliot remembers. He remembers ripping apart their flesh, he remembers the look on their face when their eyes died and they shrunk to the floor, he remembered the blood filling the floor. There was always so much.

Waking up he sees nothing. He only hears Margo murmuring prays. She's not religious, but she'll pray for him. He buries his fingers in her hair and they just breathe each other in after all this time. She doesn't move, just lets him hold her there to his bedside. He lets her up to look at him when he's ready and takes in her beautiful face full of tears and exhaustion.

"I missed you." She mouths. She doesn't even need to say it or hear it back because it's the only thing they say to each other. Again and again.

"Where's Quentin?" His mouth is so dry and weak and doesn't feel like his own.

She stutters something and he knows her lying voice even though she's so good at it. She can't hide from him.

"Eliot." She says almost silently, taking his hands into hers. She isn't the Queen she used to be, broken and he knows even without looking at himself, without even feeling the full weight of his body that isn't who he used to be. He liked who he was inside the Monster. Honest, not afraid to die, in love, but lying in that hospital bed, in that flimsy, itchy gown he knew he was the same boy who'd rather bruise and kick someone like him than admit who he was. 

"He's dead, isn't he?"

"I'm so sorry, Eliot." She was so very, very sorry and all he could do was hold her hand tighter, closer.

She was his friend,  _is_ his friend and all he had ever had in his sorry life and he'd never let her go.

Eliot is different now and it's not because his kingdom is gone.  _Not gone, just different._ That can explain everything he felt under the weight of  _his_ hand. He visits him in his dreams. He breathes his name, "Q." Just that letter and he remembers every night. Every night he spent with the him that wasn't him. The Monster. It feels like a loss he had never felt before, not hating himself for all those years, not losing friends, lovers before, not killing those people, but sitting there on that bed thinking that could have been him, really him and Q.

They spent so much time together. The other him and Q -- in diners, smoking cigarettes, drinking, talking about what it was like to be human, the "incidents" Q had had, how he wondered what it'd be like to kill someone (the Monster smiling so sickly sweet and telling him exactly what it was like), in the dark when hands moved slowly and their breaths were hot. Eliot closes his eyes, he doesn't want to remember, but it's all he has to hold onto Q. His only goodbye.

He knew how much Q missed him, as much as he misses him now.  _More._ Because Eliot wasn't dead, just trapped, but Q is...gone. No one talks about. No one looks at Alice and no one looks at him the way they look at Alice and his stomach twists into ugly little knots and he feels like the Monster that was inside of him. He'd snap her neck to have those last days with him, the last kiss as really Q and Elliot, but all he has is the hazy memories of watching someone that isn't him, but is touch and talk to Q as if they're friends, as if they're lovers.

_"You're my friend." He laid his head into his lap._

_Q swallowed the pit of coal in his stomach and nodded. This was Eliot. This was his friend. He put his hand on the top of his head. Fingers coiling in his hair. 'Wake up.' A voice from the blackness screamed, but he kept his hand there and steady his voice, "Yes, I'm your friend. I'll always be your friend."_

_"You were his friend too?" There's something in his voice that sounds almost like sadness. Looking at him, cradled in his lap he looks like Elliot and a boy, a little lost boy that Q almost feels sorry for. Monsters know nothing of sadness. Monsters know everything about sadness. "Did you love him?"_

_"Yes." Q wanted to croak. I loved him once in another life. "It's difficult to explain. I'm..."_

_"Do you love Alice? Would you very sad if I killed her?"_

_Q doesn't feel like saying anything to anyone, but to him he lets the scars show. How broken they both are sitting on the bed with the lights off. He fiddles with his lighter. He still has no idea why he picked up smoking or why he can't quit. No, he knows why. It's the only socially accepted form of suicide. The way out a long, black ash-filled road._

_The filth coats his lungs and he loves every breath of it._

_"You know the answer to that." Is all he says, his fingers brushing over his forehead._

_"I've never been in love. I loved my...but it was different. Not like you love your 'friends.'"_

_Eliot has skin like a god. Like the God that lies before, so subdued, so gentle. When the blood's washed from him and his body isn't aching for drugs he looks almost innocent. Just a boy whose life has been stole from him. He's soft and looks up at him with puppy eyes and Q almost, almost could love him despite everything he's done just to have a taste of what it could be like to have Eliot back, but he doesn't have to love him to be with him. He takes in his skin, the perfection to it, the beauty, his fingers dance over his lips opening them slightly. There's a look between them, something they both don't understand, but are willing to accept._

_"I've never done this." He says._

_"It's okay, I have. With you...with Eliot."_

_They take off their clothes in a heated pile. There's such a rush to it that Q thinks he's drunk, but he hasn't had anything. He's more intoxicated than he's ever been, but there's only the image of Eliot in his mind and saying sorry, I never got to tell you._

_Every kiss is a hungry, "I miss you."_

_He pulls him against him and he doesn't hesitate. He just follows him, learning, absorbing, trying to grasp at his desperate, human, pathetic sorrow. He tastes like cigarette smoke and tears and he knows he doesn't want this, doesn't want him. He wants Eliot, but he can never have him back. The Monster has all his memories, all the songs in his head that are deafeningly loud, all the regrets and mistakes and the bullshit that humans try to trivialise into learning experiences._

_He wraps his hands around his throat._

_"Yeah." Q whispers, "I like it like that."_

_There's a flicker of light in his eyes and a smile. He tightens his grip and pushes him down against the headboard of the bed._

_"You can be harder. You can do anything." There are so many words that don't flow from his mouth, but the Monster knows all of them. He can see inside of him, but he just kisses him and it's his first time kissing anyone. It's wet and awkward, but he thinks he could kiss those lips forever._

_His arms wrap around him in the most loving, comfortable way as if their bodies had known each other for a hundred years._

Eliot feels cold. He feels the cold of every night they spent together without him. He smells of the ash of peaches. He had so many years with him, but it wasn't long enough.


End file.
